


friends we know like fallout vapors

by mirrorchord



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Depression, Gen, M/M, band beginnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-01
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2018-01-14 03:53:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1251751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirrorchord/pseuds/mirrorchord
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing about Ray is that he’s worth noticing. (fic for no_tags, prompt: Ray/Gerard, skylines and turnstiles.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	friends we know like fallout vapors

**Author's Note:**

> content notes: implications of depression, oblique references to 9/11, tiny tiny hints of kink subtext
> 
> this turned out more character study-like than i was expecting, but i like it for what it is, which is a quiet friendship fic

_stretch out towards an ending sun_

“Yeah, dude, I don’t give a shit.” Ray’s voice crackles over the phone.

Gerard sighs and runs a hand through his hair. It’s getting too long. “There’s nothing real anymore,” he says, and it only feels half-exaggerated. Maybe ten percent.

Ray laughs, but in that way Gerard remembers where he’s obviously not laughing at  _you_.

———

———

They meet up at Starbucks, which is maybe the most cliché thing anyone in a band has ever done. Whatever, though, it’s better than alcohol. Gerard has to give himself a couple breaks.

Ray looks at Gerard’s scribbled handwriting, back at him. Back at the notebook, back at him. “Is this about—“ he starts.

“Tuesday? Yeah,” Gerard says.

“Yeah,” Ray says. He’s a little flat—what Mikey might be able to read as afraid—but his smile is genuine. Ray’s smile is always genuine, and Gerard didn’t realize he missed that until now. “This is great, Gerard, it’s really good. There’s something here.”

“Something real?” Gerard says, and he would laugh at himself, but he’s resolved not to do that. He’s trying.

“Yeah, something real,” Ray says, and Gerard almost actually believes it. His hands feel a little shaky, and it might be that he’s had three lattes with sugar already today, but it’s probably that this is it. This is it.

———

———

Gerard goes over to Ray’s house, and his basement feels a little too much like home. The sofa is the same one he and Ray and Mikey watched  _Galaxy Quest_ on, the first time they ever came over; it’s the same one Gerard accidentally spilled coffee on not once, but three times in one day; it’s the same tattered, discolored sofa Gerard once lay perfectly still on while Ray sat on his legs, in case he (or Mikey, for that matter) noticed Gerard’s sudden silence or sped-up heartbeat.

Gerard didn’t quite know what was happening, at the time; he chalked it up to weird anxiety shit. Trouble was, he usually didn’t jerk off to weird anxiety shit.

———

———

Gerard goes over to Ray’s house, but it’s a little too exciting to be home. He’s been here a couple  _hundred_  times before, but it’s been a while, and Ray invited him. It’s a little different when you need the owner’s permission to step over the doorway.

Gerard wonders idly if he can write a song made of strange, dark metaphors for sex, but Ray offers to take him downstairs and play him some ideas for the show, and that’s more important right now.

———

———

 

_this broken city sky_

Gerard had been in advertising long enough for it to eat him, a little bit. He’d started skipping out on meetings, avoiding his own charcoal pencils and his own meticulously decorated cubicle. He’d started wearing collared shirts. He hadn’t gone outside with eyeshadow on in a year and a half.

In retrospect, it’s almost as if he knew about the impeding doom before the planes hit.

It’s obvious his brain was trying to shut him down prematurely. Unfortunately for that plan, public transportation is always always delayed, and he couldn’t get out in time to avoid the panicked phone calls and shadowed skyline that snapped him out of it. It’s like he hadn’t noticed the wrinkled wedding-ring lines on people’s fingers, the harried set of a teenager’s shoulders, the inherent camaraderie of riding a bus that’s always late with the same people every day until their families were dying in front of him.

It wasn’t gonna take that long for anyone else, if Gerard could get a word in edgewise.

———

———

The thing about Ray is that he’s worth noticing. He hides it under a sweet, quiet singing voice and a sort of timidity that makes it extra surprising when he busts out the Metallica, but Gerard wonders from the beginning if it’s the same sort of quiet that kept him scared and hiding under nondescript black hoodies in high school.

Gerard pokes, metaphorically.

“Hey, Ray,” he says.

Ray looks up from the half-crushed box of cables under the TV. His hair is frizzy and unwashed, and Gerard loses his train of thought.

“Uh,” he says. “Do you think the kids will ever like us?”

“What,” Ray says. “You mean the music?”

“Yeah,” Gerard says.

“Well, um, if you keep writing stuff like this, I think we have a chance,” Ray says. He was always the optimistic one.

“Do you think you would have liked this, in high school?”

“I…didn’t talk a lot in high school,” Ray starts. “I mean, I still don’t, I guess, but it was different, you know?” He taps on the guitar with his nails, which are getting long. It makes a hollow sound. “No one talked to me about the devil except my grandma, for one.”

“Jesus,” Gerard says, “you’re missing out.”

“Not anymore,” Ray says, raising his eyebrows. The brightest lightbulb in the basement flickers over the torn-up carpet.

“You mean to say, kids are gonna like us because we’re talking about the devil?”

“Everyone talks about the devil,” Ray says. “Not everyone’s figured out how to look like him.”

Gerard is weirdly flattered.

———

———

The truth is, Ray hasn’t seen Gerard look like the devil until he sees him sing in front of people. It’s not until he’s afraid Gerard’s actually gonna tear his hair out or spit out a tooth that he notices the way the light flattens out Gerard’s colors and makes his sweat shine like a horror movie.

Gerard’s sinuses hurt, but he uses it to scream, and in the stale underground air it’s almost like some comic book magic, like only true sacrifice can bind everyone in the room to a demon’s will or a savior’s protection. Whichever Gerard’s preaching.

It’s the first time Ray thinks he’s seen a dude look really, truly  _pretty_. The kind that cuts.

———

———

The show where the kids scream back, that’s the one where Ray knows. There’s a girl who’s just hung up the phone, slammed it down on the back table; there’s a kid Ray could swear he’s seen at every show in the past five months; there’s an older guy trying to look cool, sitting on the stairs to the pit. Everything goes quiet for a second, and the guy stands up.

Five minutes later they’re surrounded. Gerard has to hold out a hand to stop a boy from falling over; Ray’s sure he’s gonna trip over a mic cord. The girl with the phone has taken off her too-big sweatshirt and come down to shove some guy in the stomach. The guitar kicks into overdrive, and the anger in the air jumps a notch, transforms. Ray feels like he’s just woken up.

Gerard looks at him, and Ray can’t see anything but an open skyline, tethered only to a boy’s cracked, glimmering hope.

_you’re not in this alone._


End file.
